Networked file storage capacities are growing at an exponential rate. In order to support this growing capacity and the growing demand, faster network infrastructures and horizontally scaled file serving approaches are being deployed. In order to support the increased networking speeds, TCP/IP offload engines (TOEs) are often being deployed to offload the CPU intensive task of TCP/IP session management and associated data flow. TOEs are powerful processors capable of adding substantially to the performance of the respective machine in which they are employed; however, they are very expensive. It would be advantageous to use the high performance capabilities of these offload engines in new ways to further increase system performance while amortizing the cost of employing such processors over the cost of the system.